Virtual Delivery: From Cyberspace to Your Door
As the hellbent cortege of rush-hour motorists careers through Beverly Hills, a Zen-like calm pervades Andy Evans’ ice-blue eyes, as if he were tooling along on some peaceful country lane.
“See, this is why I like the night shift, because you’ll only have sun for about two hours,” says Evans, 21, part-time actor and full-time driver for the e-based home delivery company Kozmo.com. “After that, it’s cool. Roll down your windows and enjoy it.”
Cool karma aside, Evans is actually blazing trails for a curious new enterprise in this reputedly laid-back but increasingly Type A mega-city. More and more, beleaguered parents and high-strung careerists are learning to cope with L.A.’s manic polyrhythms by hunting for groceries and home entertainment via the Internet, while leaving the actual road time to freewheeling spirits like him.
In their quest to squeeze a few precious seconds from the archaic 24-hour day, tens of thousands of Angelenos are buying into e-based home delivery, a postmodern marketing strategem that supposedly fuses Jetson-esque efficiency with old-fangled personalized service. At least half a dozen dot.com home delivery companies have hung out their shingles in Southern California: Whyrunout, Kozmo, Netgrocer, HomeGrocer, WholePeople and the regional granddaddy, 13-year-old Camarillo-based PDQuick, formerly known as Pink Dot. If national trends continue, that number could double over the next three years, as more cyber start-ups rush to meet the personal whims and culinary caprices of the recreationally challenged.
With the click of a mouse or the purr of a cell phone, consumers can now summon everything from diapers, Dom Perignon and heat-and-eat gourmet pasta to Eminen CDs and copies of “Erin Brockovich,” rushed to your family room, office cubicle or college dorm in as little as 30 minutes. Why risk life and limb navigating the 405 when you can sink into your La-Z-Boy, flip on “Survivor” reruns and wait for a smiling, well-groomed young man or woman to magically materialize at your doorstep, plastic goody bag in hand?
Probably someone like Evans, a handsome, affably low-key Houston native who joined Kozmo’s Seattle operation last August, as one of its orange-and-green clad “kozmonauts,” then moved to L.A. when the company set up shop here in February. Headquartered in New York, Kozmo now serves 11 markets from Boston to San Diego, dispatching videos, CDs and DVDs, magazines, over-the-counter drugs, pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and other sundries by car, bicycle and motor scooter, with no delivery charge.
“We tell you we’ll get it to you in under an hour,” says Kozmo marketing associate Shelley Oliver, “but the ‘wow’ factor is, we try to get it to you even faster.”
In some ways, the kozmonauts’ mission is a throwback to the days when doctors made house calls and most Americans knew the names of the people who brought their milk, eggs, newspapers, electric bills and Saturday Evening Post. Whether living in inner-city high-rises or far-flung suburban ranch houses, modern consumers seem to want both split-second electronic access to their every desire and the reassuring warmth of human contact--however fleeting.
Guys like Evans--and the vast majority of e-couriers, perhaps 90%, are indeed guys--supply a link between Kozmo’s disembodied customers, tapping out orders on remote keyboards, and the company’s bustling warehouse “spokes.” Evans works out of a long, windowless building on a charmless strip of torn-up Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood.
“Most of our customers are really nice,” says Evans, nudging his ’94 Ford Escort through a swarm of marauding SUVs westbound on Sunset Boulevard. “I’ve delivered to a couple of people from ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Sometimes you’ll answer the door and it’s like seeing somebody from high school. It’s like, ‘I know you.’ ”
This ‘Day Job’ Has Nighttime Hours
It’s a fine late-summmer’s eve, and despite the usual bumper-to-bumper creep along Sunset, Evans is making good time heading west. Stealing a glance at his Thomas Guide, he cites another reason he prefers to work evenings: better tips. On top of Kozmo’s $7- to $13-an-hour base pay, plus stock options, Evans nets anywhere between $5 to $30 in extra pocket money per shift from clients who appreciate his speediness and can-do demeanor. Not bad for a job that, despite a certain cyber-hipness quotient, is basically a half-step removed from schlepping Domino’s pizza.
And by working nights, Evans can devote daylight hours to his acting career. So far, his biggest studio film role has been a bit part in the upcoming “The Family Man,” with Nicolas Cage.
The second “run” of Evans’ 5 p.m.-1 a.m. shift sounds fiscally promising: a Beverly Hills residence perched high in the canyons. (Most evening deliveries tend to be residential, whereas daytime demand is split evenly between residences and workplaces.) Evans steers past rows of cheerfully opulent houses, turning gauzy in the setting sun, before a sudden incline speeds him up into the hills. He rechecks his map. “You can get lost so easily,” he cautions. “The radio cuts out and you’re on your own. You’re sitting there with your flashlight and your Thomas Guide. Just relax, though, and you’ll find it.”
Sure enough, 15 seconds later Evans pulls past heavy iron gates at an Italianate mansion belonging to Hollywood heavyweight Steve Tisch, co-producer of “Forrest Gump.” Tisch, a regular Kozmo customer, is yielding to a request from his 12-year-old son, Willy, for a hot video game called “Sea Man.” “Normally,” Tisch says, “if Willy asked me to go out and asked me to get a game, my first reaction regardless of the day or time would be no.” But Kozmo has changed Tisch’s domestic life for the better. “I like not having to drive in L.A. traffic, I find the Web site very easy to navigate. I can’t think of a more convenient way to get around shopping, which I’ll do anything to avoid.”
The transaction complete, Evans bids a polite adieu and returns to his car, not really minding that his tip was forgotten during the 10-minute conversation. As the gates close behind him, he checks in with his dispatcher, like a fighter pilot reporting back to the aerodrome. “Clear on T-- Road, ETA 20 minutes!”
“In L.A. everyone’s kind of uptight, on the go, go, go, getting business done,” Evans says as he zigzags south, sniffing out his favorite Westside shortcut. “It’s all about competition.” That, of course, goes double for the e-commerce world, where dozens of start-ups launched amid hyperbolic sales projections have gone belly-up this year awaiting the next round of venture capital. A year down the road, there’s no telling how many of these cyber-Pony Express companies will still be along for the ride.
Concept Is There, But Profits Remain Elusive
In 1999, the fledgling Kozmo lost $26.4 million on sales of $3.5 million. A few months ago, it pushed back plans for an initial $150-million public stock offering and subsequently laid off 275 workers, saying the latter move was prompted by improvements in its delivery-systems computer software. With 300 L.A. employees, Kozmo recently streamlined its Los Angeles-area “spokes” from five to three, preserving sites in Hollywood, West L.A. and the Valley while shedding those in Pasadena and the South Bay. According to some industry analysts, the average Kozmo order is $15 while the company spends around $10 per delivery--a tight window for financial profit, which the company hopes to make someday through its buying of goods in bulk.
But Kozmo recently partnered with two formidable investors, Starbucks (which coughed up $25 million) and Amazon.com ($60 million). It also has formed a strategic alliance with Warner Bros. and Columbia Tri-Star to share video rental revenues. Starting this fall, Kozmo will offer a line of gift products, as well as beer and wine in Los Angeles. “We’re extremely well-capitalized,” boasts Kozmo president Gerry Burdo. “We’ve expanded the footprint.”
While product overlap inevitably occurs among home delivery companies, several have carved out unusual niches. Whyrunout.com, headquartered in Aliso Viejo, will take care of your dry cleaning as well as restocking your refrigerator. PDQuick, which opened its first site in a former West Hollywood liquor store, can sate your appetite for a fresh-made Chinese Chicken Salad or Mile High Club Sandwich for $6.69 plus a $2.99 delivery charge. Hoping to woo the object of your affection with one of those adorable French romantic comedies? Each of Kozmo’s three L.A. warehouses stocks 25,000 video titles.
Home delivery’s rapid expansion here underscores America’s insatiable yen for what Kozmo’s marketing gurus call “e-mediate gratification.” Dan Frederickson, president and CEO of PDQuick, doesn’t think Los Angeles has “even come close” to saturation in home delivery service.
“Southern California is a 24-hour society and a very congested society and a very fast-paced society,” where most couples have to work, says Frederickson, who was lured to his current post after serving as president of Kinko’s Inc.
Dips and swerves on the information superhighway don’t deter motorized envoys like Evans, who by threading his way delicately through renewal-ravaged West Hollywood manages to reach Kozmo’s Hollywood warehouse about 80 minutes after setting out on his 14-mile round trip--not bad at the height of rush hour. “That’s the ‘wow!’ that we were talking about,” enthuses colleague Shelley Oliver.
Evans’ next order takes him to the Fairfax District, where a young woman who identifies herself as Brook has ordered “The Cider House Rules” and “Girl Interrupted.” “We use ‘em all, Homegrocer.com, drugstore.com, pets.com,” she says, gesturing at her three cats. “We sell stuff on e-bay. I think we’re pretty much the target audience here.”
Are companies like Kozmo true timesavers, a palliative for what author James Gleick refers to as chronic “hurry sickness” in his 1999 book “Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything”? Or are they actually extensions of the rat race? “You making haste haste on decay” wrote the misanthropic Big Sur bard Robinson Jeffers in 1924.
Just don’t try sharing that with a member of L.A.’s overworked commuter classes, seeking a quiet evening at home, as far away as possible from the freeways’ rumble.
